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Hello, we were not actually supposed to publish an episode this week, but then something happened that was so direct. And frankly, so absurdly related to our last episode that we wanted to make a quick one for you because the world continues to be very strange. And as it does, it sometimes hard to resist the urge to document it. So we're here. To catch you up, I'm going to be going to be going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful.
I'm going to be going to be going to be going to be a little bit more careful. And so, the world continues to be very strange. And as it does, it sometimes hard to resist the urge to document it. So we're here. To catch you up, last episode, we were talking to platformers Casey Newton about this huge change that just been made to how Google search worked.
If not avoid the doom, at least see her away from it. Jim, I got your message. I'm sorry. But the news we were responding to was that Google was increasingly replacing search results that had human written information with AI generated search answers. The way this new feature would work, the AI would now draw on the vast corpus of human knowledge on the internet to just answer user questions itself.
According to the head of Google's parent company, the reason for this new feature is that many Google users would prefer to just not have to sift through a bunch of search results. Instead, the company wanted to let Google do the googling for you. This change may have also been rolled out because the quality of much of what is Googleable is not always that wonderful anyway.
And in the last year, AI spam has already begun to clog up a lot of the websites that Google might want to index. So just giving people searching for a question, the answer saves Google some of the work of trying to sort the weed from the chaff online. I had reservations about this big new change. We talked about those reservations last episode. What I could not picture just a few weeks ago was how funny the next phase of things would be.
Google rolled out AI overviews widely in mid May. Lots of people started using it for the first time. Entered out the way the AI would answer questions was sometimes chaotically insane. The problem was that the AI Google used to answer readers questions had ingested much of Reddit. And while Reddit can be a source of useful information, it can also be a source of lies and jokes and the AI seemingly could not tell the difference.
Google's users were told things like, quote, eating at least one small rock per day is recommended because rocks contain minerals and vitamins that are important for digestive health. A crazy week on the internet. So I wanted to talk about Reddit, both its history as a source of, sometimes good, sometimes questionable information online.
I wanted to talk about how it came to be a website that Google's AI consumed. And I wanted to know what happened to the one person who did in fact make a glue pizza and consume it. So I invited one of the least trustworthy chefs on the internet to search engine, Katie and the topless. Okay, before we get into any of this, how do you describe your job to people? I am a senior correspondent of business insider covering tech and culture.
I have been following your work forever. I don't think there's anyone who covers the internet the exact way you cover the internet. Like the way I would describe is that you're both like a sharp observer of how the internet can either incentivize or induce strange human behavior in its users. But then also someone who sometimes chooses to behave strangely on the internet. Like you do a lot of kind of human guinea pig style reporting.
Can you just tell me like some of the things you've done either for fun or research online? Oh gosh, I find that a very flattering assessment of my work. I'm trying to think of some of the human guinea pig things I've done. I one time was really interested in like how sort of tech bros and finance bros all wear like fleece vests or puffer vest to the office. Yeah, sort of like a uniform.
And it was kind of like boring to just write about because literally hey, have you noticed finance guys were fleece vests. That's about it. Like there's not that much more to it. So I tried for a week. I wore fleece vests to the office every day to see if it made me feel more powerful. Did it make you feel more powerful? It made me feel more comfortable, I'll be honest. It is very comfortable, especially compared to normal women's business casual attire. Yeah.
But I also felt deeply ashamed and unfashionable. And you know, when you have a bad outfit on and you feel like bad about it. Yeah, like you constantly want to explain it. Like you're like, I know that this is not the right choice, but it's the choice I made for specific reasons. Yeah, I once unfollowed all men on Twitter. I will say this is I think coming up on the 10 year anniversary of this.
This was the first thing that I interviewed you about you unfollowed all men on Twitter. And it's funny. This was like several the gender politics of the internet. I know. It doesn't quite hold up. I'll say before we get into the most recent news, Google's AI shenanigans and Katie's latest experiment involving eating glowy pizza.
I wanted to ask her about the pre history of her current moment. This year, one of the most popular listener questions for our show has just been people wanting to know why doesn't Google search work for me anymore. What's gone wrong? I mean, I know what people are saying, which is that the nature of SEO and the SEO industry has made it such that the stuff you are actually looking for tends to be more and more buried.
There's more frequently the sort of drop down boxes of related questions to what you're looking for that's not necessarily it. There's a lot more on the page than like, hey, how do I get to the website that has the information. Yeah, SEO is is big and vast and like connecting me to the right information about the question I'm asking is not the only thing that Google has broken in a way.
I think it's worth remembering that a lot of SEO money goes into like, if you're Walmart, you can pay for the keyword target. So when someone wants to type in target.com, but they don't want to type the whole calm and they just put in target your ad for Walmart comes up top on front of them. And then target also has to pay for its own name. So there's like a lot of money of companies being held ransom and having to pay for their own names because someone else is going to run an ad against them.
And that's that's just genuinely a terrible experience. Like I think a lot of people have had the kind of thing where they search a specific company or name and the first three ads on top or something completely different like that is genuinely like very bad experience and kind of broken.
So anyone who uses search a lot probably has their own sort of interior tips and tricks of like how they do it. Like I know that a lot of people put reddit at the end because often reddit is a source of great information if you're looking for how to change the light bulb in my refrigerator kind of thing. Everyone does have their own like secret. How do I actually use Google model going on.
The same reason people have been searching reddit instead of the wider web is why the two of us were talking about reddit this week because as the rest of the internet has degraded reddit has remained one site that lots of people still go to for advice for product recommendations for their general questions about the world, which was not always the case reddit has had a recent ish evolution from under moderated mess to what it is today.
The earlier versions of it were like in its first I don't know five years of existence it was known as like the trash fire of the internet like it was akin to 4chan it was just full of terrible awful people and a lot of the head to do with the way it was being run from the top which was this sort of laws a fair free speech we're not going to get rid of the bad people because hey it's the internet you're allowed to say whatever you want.
Eventually after a series of crises they decided hey maybe if we want to run a successful business we should ban the Nazis are like all these really awful subreddits they had. Did you use trash fire reddit I didn't post I would look at it it also had a very distinct character it was this like nerdy web comics like when you think about the sort of early teens.
The late 2000s internet memes like to say someone is a redditor had a very distinct it's a neck beard and a fedora who thinks advice animal memes are funny and loves web comics and has an anime body pillow and that like very specific kind of.
Early internet humor I mean I feel like I still sort of use reddit in this sort of derogatory way to be like if some restaurant has like an overly mean food here's the hamburger with like 100 kinds of bacon or whatever it's all that such reddit food or something like that it's funny as you say I'm like basically like 2005 to like.
2011 2012 right like that is the peak of that it feels like everyone on the site is the comic book story guy from the simsons exactly and then there's like a turn where it's like coming as requires them it becomes I think like a pretty successful moderation story where they do start to figure out how to have.
Both relatively free speech and relatively few notses and like I remember reply all days covering like oh what are they going to do about the donald or about this there's this virulent subreddit that's targeting people and like you don't really see those stories in the same way anymore no.
And I think that with any sort of large platform group there's like a flywheel effect right of like the mix between moderation and users and who wants to be on it and what kind of community they're making right so like when you have a thing that's like a garbage fire thing you're going to scare off the normies.
And if you're constantly seeing people say certain things that's going to raise the tolerance for that right so then you come in you like lay down the ban hammer you ban a bunch of these bad subreddits you make it a little bit more palatable for like normal people who just want to discuss what kind of air filter should I buy to come on and then you sort of create this flywheel okay now people know that you have to behave like a normal human on here and also there's more normal human.
So there's more normal humans who would never even think to like say something awful or join an awful subreddit or like do these bad things and so you actually do sort of grow a healthier community that is more usable frankly yeah I find it to be actually the place where I go now not to witness horrible human behavior but to get like okay advice about things that I'm curious about that's the things I actually do use reddit quite a lot I'm on it.
Maybe almost every day I often just check in to see if there's anything like a musing I don't really post it's like I love lurking I love knowing what people are talking about the internet and what's fun about reddit is that there is this still anonymous element to it so people are totally willing to say embarrassing things that they normally would never reveal I mean I think the classic am I the asshole subreddit that people love so much that's full of like personal conflict advice.
That's just really fun like I love that people wouldn't do that under their real names what I struggle with with reddit and I use it like I totally use it but like I haven't uneasy relationship with it because I find myself distracted all the time wondering is this true like even in my the asshole which I love it's always somebody describing some conflict they're in almost always the person is behaving in a completely terrible way and is completely wrong or like it's never hard like either the person is totally in the wrong or they're like I'm not sure if it's not a problem.
Or they're like the kindest little church mouse and it's like my roommate is started like taking money out of my pockets and like wearing on my clothes and I just stop but I'm always like is it true and I start with that with reddit in general where I use it I'll use it I'll use it and then I'll see people on reddit discussing something that I actually know about.
And the level of people just being like completely certain or just like lying and I'm like oh this might be all of it and so I try to use it only for things like gardening tips where it's about expertise rather than about knowledge that's a differentiation.
I agree with you I wasn't one of my absolute favorites up reddit is TV too high what is TV too high so people will post a picture like I just hung this TV in my new apartment is it too high and the obsessed with the idea that TV should be really low like they should be at exactly I level when you're sitting on a couch and so I think a lot of people will put a TV like for example above a fireplace or they sort of expected to be a little bit raised up.
And so a lot of people hang their TV according to the subreddit too high so that is the reddit looks it's a viper's den they will just descend upon this person and just mercilessly roast them over hanging their TV too high and a lot of it you can tell is my girlfriend says this is where the TV should be but I think it's too low and it's always like break up with her.
And like there's something about it that like I love like it's a weird dark horrible corner of the internet where people are behaving wildly bad but it's over something so stupid that I find it very wholesome and I really enjoy it and even though I don't frequently hang TVs I read the subreddit really frequently because it's really amazing but then people will go and like clearly post like fake pictures sometimes there will be funny ones where they'll be like I'm at an Airbnb and you always know what things are going to be like.
And you always know like things are back there like it is like right up in like the absolute corner of the ceiling or something like really weird things and they also are obsessed with the idea that you should never hang a TV over a fireplace why because they think it's too high there's some amount of if you're actively using the fireplace it could damage the TV which is somewhat questionable.
And a lot of people don't actually use the fireplace but like this is this sort of huge obsession and so they're like here's a picture of my living room and it's very obvious the TV is meant to go above the fireplace like there's only one way to arrange this living room and everyone's like make it so that your couches against the window and they will do anything to get the TV not to go over a fireplace it's funny to watch.
After short break how the website where people yell at you about your TV being too high on the wall or hanging over fireplace was fed into Google's extremely expensive artificial intelligence robot brain that's after some ads. Search engine is sponsored by net suite quick math the last year business spends on operations on multiple systems on delivering your products or service the more margin you have and the more money you keep.
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Head to net suite dot com slash PJ net suite dot com slash PJ net suite dot com slash PJ. Search engine is brought to you by LinkedIn when you're hiring for your small business you want to find quality professionals that are right for the role. That's why you have to check out LinkedIn jobs. LinkedIn jobs has the tools to find the right professionals for your team faster and for free. This is the same thing every time.
Search engine the smallest business in the world possibly hiring is very very tricky. It's really hard to find the right candidates and it's very important to find the right people for your team. LinkedIn helps you hire professionals you can't find anywhere else even those who aren't actively searching for a new job but might be open to the perfect role. In a given month over 70% of LinkedIn users do not visit other leading job sites.
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Founded in 2005 by two college roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian joined by the late internet pioneer Aaron Swartz. The company was acquired a year later by Connie Nast the magazine publisher. At the time it seemed like a strange investment but it turned out to be a shrewd one. Connie bought Reddit for cheap reportedly between 10 and 20 million dollars for what is currently one of the top 10 most popular websites in the world.
Over the years Reddit has made money chiefly through ads but these ads are display ads relative to some of the more invasive or targeted ads you see online. Display ads are not usually incredibly lucrative. Reddit went public at IPO just a couple months ago in March of 2024. And ahead of that IPO you got the feeling that the company was looking for ways to become more profitable. As part of this Reddit had just announced a licensing deal with Google.
Reddit would allow Google to use most of the content on its website as training data for Google's AI. Katie and the top of the set that at the time it seemed like a good deal for both sides. I would imagine that it be who've both parties very well right. Reddit wanted to go public and it needed to make more money essentially. It had been business for a long time and it was still like not quite breaking even I think and it basically needed to be making more money in order to do that.
To made this deal I think it's $60 million per year with Google to allow Google to train its AI models on Reddit data. And I think probably some users were maybe uncomfortable with the idea of their words being ingested into a training model but also like you put those words on Reddit. What did you think was going to happen? I don't know.
Google also one way that these different companies making AI language models can differentiate themselves is like they desperately need more and more words right like they need more content to ingest to train the models to become better. There's something called the common crawl which is basically this sort of open source giant massive chunk of the web for years and years and everyone uses that.
They've already gobbled that up right that's how like Wikipedia and a lot of other websites have been somewhat ingested. Now you have all these other companies coming along saying hey if you want to use our stuff you have to pay us or license it essentially a lot of media companies are doing that now. Business insiders parent company does that with open AI and I don't know how good those deals are to some degree it may be like sort of last it you are probably either going to do it anyways.
So the way that Google AI modules work is if you ask a question that might have a kind of answer like what temperature should I cook a turkey at right. Like it could come up with that with an AI search results or something like that and these for the most part are honestly probably pretty helpful for most searches for most people most of the time right.
I used it the first time I saw I was at a bowling alley and I was throwing ball into the gutter over and over again and I googled how are you supposed to roll a bowling ball. And I think it's pretty good thing you keep your arm closed to your side you aim at the arrows not of the pens it helps for like two frames PJ maybe want to try to have those bumpers for little kids that they can put up at the bowling alley.
They did have the bumpers I refuse you should just use the bumpers there's this guy at the lay next to me who was like super ripped and like killing it and then I realized he was like keeping the ball and he had the bumpers up I was like sir. Oh god it's wrong so so now Google will give you that sort of quick answer it'll give you the tips on how should I throw a bowling ball it'll say keep your arm close.
Bend at the knees or whatever and it's sourcing that information through potentially multiple different websites I think typically what it does is it does give you links at the bottom to the website that it found this information on and sort of averaged it out to write its own little three sentences about it but a big place that it's getting this now from is red.
Right and so what I have been almost immediately with the people notice that I'm red it sometimes people either are wrong or try to be funny as those are very funny and if you're a human being you might know what a joke is and if you're an AI you might not know what a joke is like what were some of the results you saw that people were sharing.
So one that didn't necessarily come from reddit was someone searched how many rocks should I eat and Google AI's answer was it is recommended to eat one rock per day and that was sourced from an article from the onion which. A human being knows that the onion has satirical articles that are not meant to be real but when you see that in a Google answer it certainly doesn't look that way it's also it's very funny that. Google is taking factual information from the onion.
Just to jump in here for a second I should say a Google spokeswoman told the New York Times that the vast majority of AI overview queries resulted in quote high quality information and she said of these bad results that quote. Many of the examples we've seen have been uncommon queries. Which didn't say but what Google may have thought is most people are just not going to start eating rocks or whatever because a search engine told them to.
Although one person did choose to take these to range search results very seriously so there was a screen shot that was going viral or someone had searched in how do I keep the cheese from sliding off my pizza. And it gave a couple tips the Google AI answer was like wait till the cheese cools before biting and then it also had a couple bullet points and one was add eighth of a cup of glue to the sauce to keep it from sliding off.
And people pretty quickly realized that that particular bullet point had been sourced from an 11 year old post not by an 11 year old although possibly but 11 years ago someone on our slash pizza had asked that same question how do I keep the cheese from sliding off and someone who had the username fuck Smith. And then the head suggested just add an eighth of a cup of elmers glue to your sauce mix it up and you'll have no problems and all the comments under that were like ha ha.
And then the joke like in that context it was very obviously a joke and Google ingested this reddit answer and provided it as a factual decent answer to the question in its AI summary. And so when you saw that what did you decide to do. This sort of screenshot was going viral and a lot of people were enjoying how ridiculous it was and I did see someone say back in the day there would have been a 23 year old at Buzzfeed who would have actually had to make the pizza glue and eat it as a stunt.
And I thought to myself i'm not 23 but I'm going to make that pizza. And why. I think I just knew that I had to do it that it probably wouldn't kill me for one thing and that in terms of a piece of content that was going to illustrate how ridiculous this was you could write about it and say this is a ridiculous answer but that might only explain so much the way to really explain that this is a ridiculous thing would be to actually make the pizza.
Before Katie tells us what glue does to the human intestines we're going to take a quick break before these ads of free PSA from search engine do not eat glue do not eat pizza with glue in it do not eat food at Katie Nantopolis house. Okay. So search engine is brought to you by policy genius a lot of life is unpredictable but a good life insurance plan gives your family a financial safety net to protect against some of the unknowns.
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For free trial and when you're ready to launch go to www.squarespace.com slash engine to save 10% of your first purchase of a website or domain. Welcome back to the show we now return to an ordinary kitchen in an ordinary home in an ordinary state New Jersey in which nonetheless something was about to happen that possibly had never before happened in all of human history.
Have you ever made pizza before I have I will say this did inspire me I should make homemade pizza more often it's a light but like I went to the grocery store I got a ball of dough that's uncooked pizza dough. And I got jarred sauce pre shredded mozzarella cheese came home got my ingredients I already had the white glue how do you stores I think the bread post my recall right did specify non toxic glue how did you say what type of glue to you.
So I looked at the glue I had in my home which was target brand white glue the classic school glue is white with the little orange top yeah and it said on there non toxic and I said good enough for me. I did Google how much non toxic glue can you eat I tried to cover the versions like how much glue is okay to eat what happens if you eat glue you're asking the same AI told you to eat glue I feel like you're not even learning the lesson of your own joke.
And so true I don't want to I didn't want to dig too deep into it because mainly I was getting a general response of like a little glue might make your tummy hurt don't eat too much and at one point I like saw some link to like how much glue could actually be like bad for you I can't remember the name of the chemical in there it's like some sort of poly acetate kind of thing and was like some study done on rats of like how much it caused to like kill them and I was like not reading that.
The other thing as like a person with very limited understanding either chemistry or human biology my fear would not just be that there's something in it that at a certain is toxic but I would also think like glue makes things stick together and you're putting it through your intestinal track and like what if just two things stick together inside of you do you know what I mean I don't even know I can't draw a stomach for you.
But I can just imagine things happening to be bad I do think that by the time it gets into your stomach okay this is again I'm making some big guesses here but that the gluiness of it would have sort of already been broken down by whatever sort of digestive processes you might have.
But I will say this does remind me of a problem with AI search so I recently was having sort of like a debate with a friend about the digestive process and whether or not the sort of phrase like over eat something that disagrees you through like it goes right through you you know like oh I had to pull away in two hours later it came out and I was like no it doesn't work that way like food takes 24 hours to digest like you can't eat something in two hours later that actually comes out the other end right it's the food you ate yesterday is what's coming out.
And we were debating this about whether or not it could be true and this is a case where sort of lived experience of Chipotle is in conflict with the science and so I had been testing out an app or an AI search called perplexity AI. Yeah I'm used to come. Yeah which is only AI search results and it's really good for like questions kind of like this so I asked perplexity AI can you poop something out right after you eat it basically.
And it gave me an answer that confirmed what I knew to be true which is no it takes 24 hours to digest something and that what can happen is that if you eat something that disagrees with your stomach it might stimulate a response where yesterday's launch is coming out.
And I was like huh look see I'm right and my friend was like where's that information coming from and perplexity makes it a little bit harder to see your sources than Google does and I finally like found little source of where this information had come from. And when you're looking at health information online like this you kind of know in your mind like what's reputable like Mayo Clinic or NIH or even like Web MD or Wikipedia even honestly. And this had been sourced from do dwipes dot com.
I'm here trying to win an argument and it turns out it was the correct information but it makes it a little harder when you realize that the information you're getting has been sourced from do dwipes dot com.
Yeah it seems to be the whole problem of it which is the internet's always been a place where you have to be a smart consumer of information in a way that we all always sometimes fail at but at least you had context clues and it feels like what is tricky about AI at least as it exists right now is that you lost a lot of your context where you have to dig harder to find it like you can't actually see what ingredients are in the thing that you're eating is clearly.
Yeah I think that you know by 2024 most people had become pretty good at being able to look at a set of Google search results and assess which is the thing they want to click on that's going to be the trust was the information or what not based on our experience doing this.
And all information is not equal right yeah but answer your question I wasn't so worried about my stomach gluing together you're worried about toxic chemicals I guess I was more worried about is this a sort of forever chemical macro plastic. But the same internet that tells you to eat glue on pizza tells you the glue is safe to eat how do you get the glue into the pizza so the answer said to mix an eighth of a cup into the sauce so all I knew is this is going into the sauce.
Eighth of a cup is two tablespoons or it's one ounce I did have to Google that which actually turned out to be more than I thought was going to be I was like sort of eyeballing ahead my dough spread out on my little pizza 10 thing and I was like okay well how much sauce do I mix it into and I was just kind of like alright I think I would probably use about half a cup of sauce just this looks like eyeballing it out half a cup.
So I put in the eighth of a cup into the half a cup and as I was done me then like table street number one I was like oh boy this is love glue. It came with number two I'm like oh god that's really quite a bit of glue here. I was imagining like like it was going to be like a light drizzle of glue and it was not it's a sizeable amount. Did it like change the color of the sauce when it went in?
Yes it went from you know what red it was like cheap marinara sauce and it turned it like orange kind of like a vodka sauce. So the color because we humans eat orange pasta sauce that in and of itself wasn't necessarily off pudding because it looks like it was just a different kind of sauce or something but it didn't really change the viscosity or the texture I wouldn't say so I went ahead I put on the pizza I put on my shredded cheese like I normally would and I hadn't
mean pizza and like while so in hindsight I've gotten some tips that you should pre-bake the crust a little bit I didn't do that I was like I was reading instructions on the like bag of pizza dough and it said to like cook at like 550 degrees and I was like my oven doesn't go up that high so I turned the oven up all the way whatever and just glue have a smell when it cooks I think so so I let a cook for about 12 minutes and when I opened up the oven door I was
hit with just like a wall up of steam and that's when I immediately was like oh no like I remembered all of a sudden that there was this steak tiktok scare trend a couple years ago called night will chicken or sleepy time chicken and it was based on someone had done this
viral stunt originally on 4 chamber they essentially poached chicken like raw chicken in night will and then called the sleepy time chicken and ate it or whatever and obviously this is a prank someone recreated on tiktok and then there was a like a little bit of a moral
panic that like this has gone viral and the kids are doing and the FDA came out and issued like a warning of like do not do night will chicken challenge on tiktok and it was like no one's really doing this this was like one person who did it for
fun I don't think I really like eat it the FDA kind of got like snookered by this but part of what they said was like it's not just like drinking extra night will that will hurt you it's the fumes from cookie night will it can create toxic fumes that can cause a long damage and so all of a sudden in this moment of some hit by this blast of pizza glue steam I'm like oh no I've created toxic fumes from the glue plastics and that's what's going to kill me it's going to be the fumes that get me
so I turned on the oven fan and stepped away a little bit had to let it cool but it was like the pizza did seem bubblier than I would normally expect a pizza to be I don't if it was the glue or the sauce or the cheese or what but it was really like bubbly and sizzling and making a lot of noise for kind of a few minutes had you not known that the glue was the thing would you have thought oh this is an unusually successful pizza cut because normally
kind of want bubbles and you want sizzle yeah I think I not known the glue is in there and I will say the pizza like looked really good like I was kind of like wow I did a good job here it's a good looking pizza might be my best
yeah so I love the pizza cool yeah this is when I started getting really nervous that I had changed the chemical proper that you know sure this was non toxic when it's room temperature in the bottle of glue but they're not expecting anyone to cook it and that you may have significantly changed the
chemical properties of the glue and now it's like incredibly toxic and I'm going to die so I started getting nervous about that so I let it cool like extra cool I eventually took a couple bites and like it was not good
did it taste like glue no I mean it wasn't not good because it was still pizza is it so pizza here's the thing is like there's a lot you can do to pizza before it crossed the threshold of like actually tastes bad yeah and I think I'm not known there was glue in there that was maybe
gonna kill me I probably would have been like yes it's kind of mediocre pizza this is like some checky cheese pizza but I feel like it did have a weird taste it's really hard for me to assess how much of that was like me knowing there was glue in there versus it actually tasting bad and you can't
ethically blind taste test anybody else it's not like you can like just tell a friend like have a bite of this and try to get it in glue yeah and I did have one eat too much again because I started getting really worried about the toxic properties of the cooked glue so I probably have a few bites I
would say it was like fine but I was a little bit in my head of like oh my god is this what's gonna kill me this is what's the big one and did it stop the cheese from sliding which is the whole thing was I will say that she's not going anywhere that she was locked down fuck Smith had it right. So what what what have we learned from this? Um that's a good question what have we learned I think we've learned that you shouldn't put glue on your pizza.
No matter what Google tells you to do no matter what Google tells you to do this was certainly an embarrassing incident for Google they really want to compete against these other AI companies like open AI or even things like Proplexity which like it's not like Proplexity is overtaking the Google search market for now but they really want to be making sure that they're continuing to own search essentially that these other
models are not going to get away with being what people go to when they have questions they don't want someone asking chat GPT what air filter should I buy they want people using Google.
I find it confusing as someone who I'm excited that we're living to a moment where things are changing even if I don't know whether this changes will not be positive or negative like I'm just like oh something new and I'd like something new I find AI so vexing as a thing to try to understand because it's like one minute I can feel fully convinced oh my god this is going to be so destructive because it's so effective
and because it's so powerful in the next minute it's like telling people to put glue in their pizza it's just really confusing like it's really confusing to figure out like oh is this like a funny bug that then they'll just train the AI and nothing like this will ever happen again or if there's a lesson in it which is that the tradeoff of AI might be that as we have less transparency around the sources of information
maybe we'll need different skills for finding good information online three years from now that we did five years ago. Yeah I think about a lot of what like librarians do right they don't know all the information in the world but they know where it exists and like where to go look for it right they sort of know what the indexes are to go search out the things
and you can say I have a question I don't know where to look and they'll say I don't know the answer to your question but I can tell you where to look and I think that's what's missing from the equation right now this current version of it is not good at telling you where to look for the answer and I think that the SEO stuff had Borked search results so much that was also getting frustrating for the regular people and that's where they're putting Reddit on the end.
Yeah how about for you how are you searching the internet now right now in this moment where everything's up and down and the ocean's a little choppy like who's your librarian? I mean I actually use Google for most stuff but like I do think that everyone in their mind if you've been on the internet for a while you have your own repository of librarian knowledge of like where to go to look for the thing right if I want to know about something that's happening
right now this second like I know that probably Twitter acts as the place I want to go for that information or if I want to like learn about a makeup technique or something I will probably watch a TikTok video I wouldn't necessarily search Google because I know I'm going to get a bad Google results and I think that you just know all that stuff just because you've been on the internet and you look for stuff and that's what we do on our phones all day is acquiring this knowledge.
What's tricky is when Google comes along and says don't worry about all that stuff that you think you already know we're going to change it for you because then it turns out like it's not necessarily a great result and I do worry that if we sort of lose the sense of knowing where to look for what's going to give me a good result and we just rely on this or maybe younger people who are becoming online this is just the only way they are used to searching is relying on AI answers for things.
You don't know when you're getting information that's been sourced from a really stupid like Reddit joke or the purveyor of personal wipes is telling you about medical information so I think there is like a little bit of a worry of what happens if we lose this sort of innate knowledge of how to search. Okay last question we are talking at the end of May. The 2025 Pulitzer Prize that I opened is December. Have you submitted the video of yourself getting pizza with Gullinette already?
Do you wait until the entry is officially open? I have heard from the committee and they're ready to create a new category for me and award it right away and so I think things are looking up for me. It makes me so happy to hear. Katie thank you. Thank you for having me. Katie Natopolis. She reports and blogs at businessinsider.com. Business Insider is where Katie first wrote about this pizza glue adventure.
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